Tokyo Rose

Newsmen and a handful of G.I.s at last, after three long years, got a look at the Jap radio's famed, honey-voiced Tokyo Rose. Their opinion: with television, she wouldn't have lasted.

As U.S. intelligence officers had suspected, she was California-born, Jap-blooded: one Iva Toguri, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of California. She said she had left Los Angeles "to see a sick aunt" in Japan in July 1941, was stranded in Tokyo after Pearl Harbor. She was surprised at her popularity among U.S. servicemen (who liked to listen to her program of old jukebox favorites, which were intended to make G.I.s home sick) and amazed that anyone would be lieve she had done her native U.S. wrong: "I didn't think I was doing anything dis loyal." According to Iva, two other girls dou bled on the Zero Hour, one American, one Canadian -- and if anything bad was said, they said it. The continuity was written, she said, by a Captain Charles Cousins, an Australian captured at Singapore, and a U.S. Army captain named Ince. She first went on the air as "Ann" (short for announcer), and later expanded the name to "Orphan Annie, your playmate." (She never used Tokyo Rose, the G.I. name for her. ) It was all a lie, also, she insisted, that she had opened her program by saying: "Good evening again to the . . . forgotten men, the American fighting men. . . ." The wages of sin, in her case, were 100 yen ($6.60) a month, later raised to 147 yen. Just what the punishment will be, if any, the U.S. had not yet announced. (Her defense attorneys would undoubtedly bring up the U.S. Navy's silly-season award to her for raising the morale of U.S. troops--TIME, Aug. 20.) In April she married a Portuguese employe of the Domei News Agency, and hoped that might make her a Portuguese citizen (the latest U.S. laws on the point have not been court tested, but presumably she could not renounce U.S. citizenship without the approval of the U.S.). Her brother Fred, who now helps run the family fruit stand in Chicago, said last week: "All we know is what we read in the papers. We feel we are not in a position to condemn."

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